Volume 23, Number 3 · March 4, 1976
The Passions of Bertrand Russell
By Bernard Williams
The Life of Bertrand Russell
by Ronald W. Clark
Knopf, 766 pp., $17.50
The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love
by Dora Russell
Putnam's, 304 pp., $9.95
My Father Bertrand Russell
by Katharine Tait
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 224 pp., $8.95
Bertrand Russell
by A.J. Ayer
Viking (Modern Masters), 168 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Bertrand Russell's Autobiography (which was published in three volumes in the 1960s) is a work that leaves one in more than one way winded. It is not altogether a book, bringing together a rather random collection of letters with a sketchy account of the author's life which, though sometimes alarmingly frank, omits much and hurries the reader on from one cursorily described event to another. It is not just the speed of travel that leaves one gasping, but the glancing view of some episodes that Russell puts in. One is several times confronted with a summary or dismissive account of central, professedly transforming, occurrences in his life, which cannot, surely, represent things as they were then lived, yet at the same time is not just the misleading product of a distant or oblique style of recollection.
Review, 3670 words
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